My name is Rona Arato. My husband, Paul, is a survivor of the Holocaust that occurred during the Second World War. I knew some of Paul’s story: he, his brother, Oscar, and their mother, Lenke, were in the Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp and on a death train that was liberated by the American Ninth Army. But many of the details from that awful time were missing. It was only after we learned about the Teaching History Matters project and met other train survivors and the soldiers who liberated them that we were really able to put the pieces of his story together.
To tell it, I listened to many testimonies and read the memoirs of the survivors and soldiers from that fateful event and the camp. Matt Rozell—the teacher who created Teaching History Matters and brought us all together—and the historians at the Bergen Belsen Memorial were all generous with information. In 1994, Paul and I attended a memorial service in the Karcagi Synagogue commemorating the 50th anniversary of the German occupation, and I had the opportunity then, and on subsequent trips, to get to know the people who appear as children in this book.
What you read here is all based on actual events. I have tried to honor the integrity and truth of everyone’s story. The dialogue is mostly imagined, but the account it tells is true. The main characters are real people.
This has been a difficult book to write but one that I knew I had to write. It is a tribute to the train survivors, the soldiers who liberated them, and to Matt Rozell.
Rona Arato